At LinuxTag on Saturday, a meeting of Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the collaboration of both projects. The aim was to to talk about the common future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt.

Via what attack pathway? Unless you never use the "su" command either, it's no less secure than having a separate root password.

unable to remove firefox

You can remove firefox. In the process you'll lose certain other bits of infrastructure that depend on the gecko widget that it provides. Now that xulrunner is a viable alternative, that'll be fixed.

launching an init 3 session

Debian (and most of its derivatives, including Ubuntu) has never had a policy of only starting X in certain runlevels. The boot menu offers you the option of booting in single user mode, which is equivalent for most purposes.

You are new to Linux, right?

No. The techrepublic article is woefully inaccurate - the author seems to know nothing about how sensible multi-tasking operating systems work, presents multiple claims as facts when they simply aren't and spends more time berating Jeff than actually attempting to understand any of his answers. But even so, the author isn't new to Linux. Experience doesn't imply competence.